A statistical approach for the evaluation of thermal and visual comfort in free-running buildings

In recent years, the study of indoor environmental comfort during the warm season has been one of the most attractive and hard tasks for architects and energy designers. Nowadays, thanks to the available high-performance utilities, the dynamic energy simulation of a building is relatively easy. Nevertheless, since it should simultaneously account for thermal, visual and air quality issues, a global approach, often neglected, becomes necessary. In the present work, an approach based on simple indicators calculated on a statistical basis will be presented; it can be useful for the simultaneous evaluation of the indoor thermal and visual comfort on a more comprehensive perspective, and it can be applied in any building energy analysis where a comparison between different solutions or strategies is required. At the end of the paper this approach is tested on a simple case study in order to show how the approach can be used to evaluate the influence of the size and the typology of a window on indoor comfort. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.